Resident Evil 5 Trailer released

Yesterday the extended trailer for Resident Evil 5 was released. By now gamers the world over have gotten a chance to see it, so it’s hardly breaking news. I’m going to share (in brief) my thoughts on what the game looks like, based on what’s showcased in the above clip. Although the trailer lasts only three minutes, it covers plenty of ground.

The setup looks very similar to Resident Evil 4, with the behind-the-back camera view and laser aiming. You can still target specific body parts, knock weapons out of hands, and intercept flying projectiles. The melee moves are present too, though I’m not sure you can use them without on-screen prompts.

The graphics are beautiful, and that’s no surprise. RE5 is set for release on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, both of which are notorious for their GPU horsepower. I’ve always stood by my stance that visuals don’t mean jack when it comes to actual gameplay, but that kind of sharpness could, at the very least, make RE5 a very scary title.

Details remain sketchy about the plot. Based on the trailer, one can conclude two things about the game’s story: you are Chris Redfield, and your vacation to Africa has gone rather awry. Like that one guy from the last installment, you find yourself in a village of people who truly, honestly do not care for you, and show off their (lack of) hospitality by throwing axes and trying to chew on your neck.

Oh, I should also mention the last few seconds of the trailer, which show an unidentified character waking up inside of a containment tank. I have a few guesses on who this person may be. The camera is so close up on the stranger’s face that it’s difficult to say, and I can’t even tell if it’s a male or female.

The action looks, to put it bluntly, intense. While RE4 certainly had its share of tension, this one makes Leon’s journey into Spai.. er, an ‘undisclosed location in Europe’ look like a casual tourist mishap. There’s not a moment during the gameplay footage where Chris isn’t surrounded on all sides by restless, blood-starved hordes. The key thing here is that there are so many more of them, no doubt due to faster processor power.

And finally… okay, I’m a little apprehensive about pointing this out; perhaps you wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t mention it. Don’t you think there’s something a little, um, off with a white man gunning his way through mobs of raging black people? Now, I realize that things are probably going to change between now and the game’s actual release date (the producers say sometime in 2009)– that said, this is the kind of three minutes that’s likely to get civil rights groups up in arms. Surely Japan/Capcom realizes that it’s not just blacks living in Africa, right?

To sum up: It looks like Resident Evil 4 with a whole lot of improvements. Good God, I need to play this.

“The Simpsons Movie”: Redemption, or the Final Nail?

Yesterday, I was busy doing what I normally do (lying around, being an introvert, not meeting new people) when a hard fact suddenly hit me:

“The Simpsons” has been around a long, long time.

I was renting “Bart vs. the Space Mutants” for my NES back in 1990, and that was SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. Since then, my primary, entire elementary, adolescence, teen, and young adult years have run parallel to this show’s continued existence. I was there for everything: the raging soccer mom movement against Bart’s underachiever/sling-shot t-shirts, the show being moved to Thursday nights, the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” specials, Milhouse dealing with his parents divorce, fandom spreading to the Internet, comic books, trading cards, stickers and posters. I once had a towering stack of VHS tapes where I’d religiously recorded edited syndicated episodes, and a separate one where I taped most of the eighth season when it was originally broadcast (this, coincediently, means I also owned a collection of commercials from 1996.)

And of course, I was there when the show hit absolute rock-bottom. Around about season nine or so, all the old writers were suddenly shuffled out the door and replaced with a staff who had never seen a single previous episode in their lives. The character were reduced to one-joke shells of what they once were, and the stories were lame-brained affairs, clearly the result of producers whose hammers were falling on an empty chamber of ideas. But mostly, it was the jokes. Out of the blue, they just stopped being funny.

So I completely stopped watching any new airings of the show. Instead, I became content on collecting DVDs of the older, better days, and watched “The Simpsons” collapse into utter banality from afar. For some reason, it continues being on the air despite being the equivalent of a maggot-infested, desecrated corpse. Only the “Simpsons” name is keeping it alive.

Now, in less than three days time, The Simpsons Movie will be hitting theaters. It’s certainly no small event, especially for Fox, who have been advertising the hell out of it. As the countdown to the movie’s nationwide release begins, I can’t help but wonder if this will be the redeeming factor in the show’s history. One big upside is that the screenplay was written by a lot of the old writing staff– the ones who didn’t confuse “The Simpsons” with a “Family Guy” marathon.

Will “The Simpsons” be released from its prison of despair? Or will it keep rotting and be forced to go on living, like a 29-year-old cat with no hair and teeth? Only time will tell.

THIS JUST IN: Rapture to Happen December 14, 2007

You know, I never really liked going to church. The idea of having to sit still for an hour (occasionally standing up in-between) while a guy at the front of the room tells me about how the bad things I did all week are going to get me in trouble with a giant man in the clouds– well, I’d rather be at home playing “Mega Man”, amiright?

Well, I realize now that I was dead wrong all those years. Not only should I have attended services on Sundays, but also Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and any days left in-between. Mission trips? Youth group volunteering? Witnessing to my atheist friends? Oh yes. All of that. Because Jesus is coming back, my friends. Less than six months from now, every holy-roller I ever shut my ears toward will be floating around in a serene heaven, while the rest of us unsaved are stuck on earth dealing with plagues of locusts, rivers of blood, and computer-generated singing chipmunk critters.

I MEAN LOOK AT THAT POSTER. JUST LOOK AT IT. Is that not a sign that the Antichrist is preparing to assume control over a doomed earth? I can practically smell the planet burning to cinders right now. What level of self-loathing is Jason Lee at these days!? And who the HELL thought it was a good idea to turn Simon into a Crip-color-wearing gangsta whiteboy?

All I know for sure, is that Hollywood is a human wasteland these days, where good ideas are tossed to the wind while idiots are allowed to freely hurl their poop nuggets toward the clueless masses, like the devolved apes they are.

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING FROM OUR MISTAKES!?